Fixed width Unicode font - some Unicode characters not correct displayed

chrisb2010 · Mar 11, 2010#12010-03-11T06:32+00:00

I can view Unicode characters such as U+2120 SERVICE MARK (the SM symbol) in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 by choosing the Courier New font. However, I create a UTF8 file in UE, use Courier New as the font, and the SM symbol character displays as a box. In UE, if I switch to Arial Unicode MS, then the SM symbol displays correctly, but that's not a fixed width font.

Why is it that Visual Studio shows the character correct and UE can't even when using the same font?

How can I get UE to display Unicode characters in a fixed font?

Thanks for any ideas,
Chris

Mofi · Mar 12, 2010#22010-03-12T07:09+00:00

I'm using also Courier New by default and created a Unicode file in UltraEdit with some characters, switched to hex edit mode and replaced the code of the first character with 20 21 to get the Unicode character with hexadecimal code 0x2120. After switching back to normal text display I could see that the character was displayed as rectangular as it is typical for characters not available in a font.

So I opened Word 2007 and copied the character from UltraEdit into the Word document. Although Arial is my default in Word, Word uses font MS Mincho for the ℠ character. It could not change the font for this character to Arial or Courier New. Word ignored my font selection and uses for this character always font MS Mincho. Using font MS Mincho in UltraEdit results also in a correct display of the character. It looks like MS Mincho is also a fixed width font, but in my point of view this font is not really good for usage in a text editor.

Conclusion: I suppose this Unicode character is not available in Courier New and Arial and Visual Studio 2008 also automatically uses a different font (probably MS Mincho) for this character as MS Word 2007.

Tested with Windows XP SP3 with Office 2007 Prof. installed.

chrisb2010 · Mar 16, 2010#32010-03-16T01:39+00:00

Thanks Mofi, you've been helpful on my last couple of posts. That makes sense that Visual Studio 2008 is probably switching to some other font for those characters that Courier New can't display. I'll just switch to some Unicode font in UE on those rare occasions I need to edit a Unicode file.

Chris